Payward Seeks OCC National Trust Charter for Crypto Custody

Payward, the parent company of the Kraken exchange, has filed an application with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to form Payward National Trust Company. The filing was submitted from Cheyenne, Wyoming.

The proposed trust would provide federally regulated custody and fiduciary services for digital assets to institutional clients and to individuals who require bank-level custody under federal oversight.

If the OCC approves the charter, Payward National Trust Company would be able to operate across all 50 states without seeking separate licenses in each state.

Payward said the trust charter is intended to operate alongside Kraken Financial, its Wyoming Special Purpose Depository Institution that holds a Federal Reserve master account. The company said the SPDI and the Federal Reserve master account provide access to both state and federal banking frameworks.

Arjun Sethi, co-CEO, stated, “A national trust company provides the certainty institutions require and establishes the infrastructure to build the next generation of custody.” Sethi noted the Wyoming SPDI and the Federal Reserve master account provide a foundation, and that a national trust would expand services available to clients while federal digital asset rules develop.

A national trust charter would allow Payward to qualify as a federally regulated custodian, a status many asset managers, pension funds and corporations require before allocating capital to digital assets through a third-party custodian.

The OCC has granted conditional charters to crypto-focused firms in the past; national trust charters are a distinct and broader form of federal authorization. Payward has not disclosed a timeline for OCC review, projected capitalization for the trust, or staffing plans in the application.

Payward describes itself as a unified financial infrastructure platform built on shared systems for liquidity, risk management, collateral and settlement. Its product portfolio includes Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Bitnomial and CF Benchmarks. The company separates core infrastructure from product delivery so individual products serve specific customer segments and regulatory contexts while drawing on the same underlying systems.